The proposal that the text be marked and an apparatus of suggested emendations be provided under the text responds to the consensus that text and apparatus in modern edition form, or should form, an integrated whole. Yet users tend not to consult the apparatus to the extent that each editor considers absolutely necessary even just for the due use of the edited text. Markings in the text and the emendation apparatus cancel again the spatial and factual separation of text and apparatus that had become necessary because of the wealth of material of authorized versions which needed to be coped with, but which had also encouraged the delusion that the edited text was an objective entity that one could use as a stable basis for further research.
The integral apparatus is a mode of text presentation incorporating variance into the invariant context. Conceptually, the idea of the integral apparatus–whatever its actual design–has gone beyond the notion of the apparatus as a textual and typographical adjunct to the edited text of a scholarly edition. Instead, the integral apparatus is, or represents, the text itself as multilayered, multiple factored, and multiply generated. It is the text that literary theory today recognizes as emanating from authorial writing and from socially and culturally conditioned transmission.